When I first saw Jumanji I was transformed to my kid soul. It was at summer camp and it was a day that the activity was that it was everyone’s birthday party. I think I was eight or something. The floor was littered in individually wrapped pieces of bubble gum just to add a surreal mood to this memory I guess and I went around the room asking everyone “WHAT IS THIS MOVIE??” like it was a life or death situation until someone told me the title and I rented it at blockbuster so many times my parents bought me a VHS of it and I proceeded to watch it over and over again. Now I’m trying to piece together the common themes of 90’s movies as they relate to the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in Capricorn and my first lead of intrigue is the theme of an all-consuming and disruptive reality. I started thinking about this because I watched So I Married An Axe Murderer for the first time the other night and it gave me the same feeling I remembered from Jumanji in a kind of way, and the movies only came out two years apart, so now I’m trying to figure out what other 90’s movies or art in general fit in this category. Please support my weird/obsessive inclinations and share with me below what movies fit here (and why), I need to know!
Not only are the all-consuming disruptive realities that, but they involve a deconstruction (Uranus) of the cultural status-quo (Capricorn). Complete, radical shifting from ‘normal life’, Neptunian like episodes of confusion, illusion, delusion, and things quite beyond belief! What do you guys think?
2 Comments
grayastrology
May 8, 2015 at 3:46 amHey Sabrina, I love this topic. I am hoping to write some about Harry Potter coming up and link in a bit of Uranus-Neptune as JK Rowling began writing the series during this time period. In music the Uranian rise of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and its shattering impact on music went with this as well. I know there are so many great film examples so I will work on getting an organized idea about that together and comment later. Here are some quotes from Richard Tarnas in “Cosmos and Psyche” that illuminate the Uranus and Neptune conjunction of this time and all times:
“Throughout…centuries I noticed a parallel pattern of historical and cultural phenomena, similarly coincident with the alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle, involving the emrgence of utopian social visions and movements. Again, the underlying archetypal gestalt in this category can be recognized as a distinct synthesis of the two relevant principles: Uranus’s Promethean impulse towards creative experiment and innovation, freedom, rebellion against the status quo, and a vector towards the future all complexly interacting with Neptune’s idealism and hope, spiritual inspiration, intuitive vision, the dissolving of conventional boundaries and structures, and the imagination of a perfect harmony and unity to be realized in the human community (p. 375)”
It’s also interesting how the develop of the Internet took off with the Uranus and Neptune conjunction of the 1990s:
“Equally suggestive of this archetypal gestalt are such characteristic terms and metaphors as “cyberspace,” the “World Wide Web,” “surfing the datastream,” “hypertext,” and the dynamic and nonlinear amorphous “sea” of virtually infinite sources of information, complexly interconnected through hypertext links, all mediated by genie-like search engines that have revolutionized the search for and transmission of knowledge. The many allusions toe the Internet as facilitating the emergence of a “global mind,” “Gaia mind,” the “Telhardian noosphere,” and “Indra’s net,” with Internet connections, high-speed fiber-optic cable (much of it undersea), and wireless technology that can potentially link every individual node of consciousness to every other on the planet, clearly reflect the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex. We can also recognize the distinctive signs of this planetary combination in the widespread utopian, even mystical aspirations that emerged during these years in direct connection with the new technologies. [p. 422]”
andrewnoelart
May 8, 2015 at 10:06 amI feel like I know the feeling youre talking about… like a kind of nostalgia? or at least a surreal kind of nostalgia? Or like weird in a sense that your watching something that’s full of fantastic things that wouldn’t actually happen in reality -disbelief? movies that come to mind: Terry Gilliam films, Harold and Maude (60s), movies with Kevin spacey, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, dancer in the dark. I also feel like it’s probably very specific to the person – like for you it’s jumanji, for someone else it might be a different thing. It could be subjective. I had the same experience with the land before time as a kid – not really sure why or if that relates to a uranius – neptunian conjunction with capricorn.
Or are you talking about specific stories and movies where someone cracks and starts living in a separate reality (like a ‘Wildman’), creating a kind of illusion about themself or gets thrown into a different kind of reality. Or someone who wakes up and realizes they’ve been daydreaming, sort of like the premise of ‘secret life of Walter mitty’.
I think there are also pieces of art or music or movies or even books that try to recreate the same feeling, which adds a dimension to the feeling. Like a yearning for a feeling you had as a child who experienced pure joy or felt truly ecstatic. I feel like that in itself is an art.
Also reminds me of a film called ‘good bye Lenin’ about someone who falls into a coma while the Berlin wall is being destroyed and governments are changing. The main character actually is advised to console and keep the person in a coma from knowing what changes have taken place because of her state after she comes to. So everyone around this person basically has to pretend that things are as they were without letting on to the truth, pretty interesting/a little depressing. So a world of illusion is built around one person in the movie, kind of close to total immersion but one step removed. The music is really nice, it’s by Yann Teirsen ( also did music for amelie). It’s funny, heartbreaking, and German.
Anyway, I might be coming from a different place from what you wrote about. I always felt like jumanji was about someone who couldn’t cope with reality (from a psychological standpoint), but is obviously presented in a way that was more about breaking out of norms wrapped in a story. The children’s book has a safari person who pops out of the game and is centered around the two kids. It really doesn’t have much to do with robin Williams’ character oddly enough.